


Assam(coe) and Conversation

by dancingontheedge



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: 18th century gender roles, Character Study, Gen, Republican Motherhood (or it's predecessor), Revolutionary War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-07 23:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12852036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancingontheedge/pseuds/dancingontheedge
Summary: Mary and Simcoe sit down to tea and have a conversation about brutality while musing, independently of the other, on morality and gender roles.





	Assam(coe) and Conversation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tvsn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvsn/gifts).



> This work takes place pre ear!shot, but is pretty nebulous in terms of timing because I didn't do a rewatch and still haven't seen season 4.
> 
> Assam is a type of Indian tea, which is typically part of the English Afternoon Tea mix.
> 
> Happy birthday Tav!!!!! I hope you enjoy your present!!! I know it's a bit late, but I swear it's still the 30th here, if only for a half hour more. I was thinking of doing something shippy (because I really do think Mary/Simcoe is a good ship), but apparently what we get instead is almost 1500 words of 18th Century Gender Roles.

John Graves Simcoe prided himself on his unflinching honesty, even in the face of potential personal unpleasantness. For example, the conversation that he had with Mary Woodhull in late 1779 regarding his reputation for singular brutality. It was approximately 4:00 in the afternoon, and they had just sat down to tea in Whitehall.  The late afternoon light was streaming weakly through the windows.  Mary was pouring from a delicate imported pot into matching cups. Though the family had little sugar and no lemon, it was still a luxury greater than many of similar wealth in the area could provide, and more in keeping with the lifestyle Mary had expected when she married Woodhull than the one she had received. After the tea was poured and the pleasantries dispensed with, Mary deliberately put down her cup, looked Simcoe in the eye, and asked him how he kept a leash on his brutality. Simcoe, taken aback, replied honestly-- though he would have done so even if he had not been shocked by her abrupt question and the rage he could see in her eyes but not hear in her voice.

"It is a matter of context, Mrs. Woodhull. Nothing more, nothing less."

"I do not understand. Context is what makes you retain the veneer of civility?"

"It is not a veneer. When I am not a soldier, I do not do a soldier's work. I am not acting civilized, I _am_ civilized, because there is nothing in the situation that requires me to be otherwise.  War is the opposite of civilized, and the civilized soldier is the ineffective soldier.  I take great pains to be effective at what I do.  If that requires a certain amount of brutality than I attribute it to the nature of war, rather than my own nature."

This response made things clearer to Mary.  Simcoe lived as if he were two men.  One a soldier, garbed in red and white or green and black.  The other a man, with impeccable manners and a yearning for a woman he could not have.  It made his choice of Anna, of all the women in town to fixate on, even clearer.  For all she did not act like it, until the arrest of Selah Strong she was the wealthiest woman in town.  Mary could not imagine having the freedom to wear the most exquisitely embroidered robes d'anglais and choosing instead plain gowns in simple cuts and dark colors.  Mary's own wardrobe was better than Anna's, though she felt the sting of her debt to Richard for her gowns daily. 

As often as Mary rubbed the fabric of her fine skirts between her fingers while thinking bitter thoughts, she thought still more about how she was to reconcile her own violent impulses.  That was, of course, the reason for her question to Simcoe.  He was the only person of her acquaintance with such different faces.  Even Abe, living the double life of a spy, retained the same personality traits regardless of which part he was playing.  Not so Simcoe.  But his response was utterly unhelpful in the face of her reality, for Mary's context never changed in any a meaningful way.  Sure she moved between Whitehall and the sturdy farmhouse that Abe had built for them, and switched between drab work clothing and the exquisite gowns she could wear at Whitehall.  But the context of herself never changed.  She was always a wife, always a mother.  She had been raised to embody the values of the family and of a femininity both delicate and morally strong.  And she would do anything to protect her family.  Absolutely anything.  And that was the problem, because there was no room in her concept of self for the things she had done.  She had burned down her own home to cover up a murder.  She had plotted the deaths of several men, and helped to orchestrate a civil war that was the opposite of civil between Hewlett's forces and Simcoe's.  She was, even now, plotting with her husband to bring down this contradiction of a man.  She was hardly the moral force she was raised to be, and she could not reconcile the cool violence that she purveyed with the warmth she delivered to little Thomas.  And how could she raise Thomas to be a good man when she was an unnaturally violent woman?

Mary pressed her lips together, so that they almost disappeared.

"What would you do about the brutality if you were not a soldier.  If there was no context in which it was permissible to fight?"

She picked up her teacup and sipped from it.  White porcelain with a delicate tracery of floral design, dainty, and as easily shattered as society dictated she ought to be.

Simcoe thought for a moment. He had not purchased his commission with the idea that he was doing so to let some innate brutality loose on the world.  Rather, he was following the wishes of his deceased father, who had been a military man.  Prior to that, he had not given much thought to violence.  He supposes, thinking back on it, that he had gotten into fights at Eton, but they were the normal sort and the other boys certainly never displayed the fear that he had seen in the eyes of the men since he donned his reds.  During his civilian life, he was well within the bounds of "normal" for a man of his set, in terms of violence.  But that was not her question, for it was always acceptable for a man to be a little bit violent.  It was expected, even, that a man would have violent urges and get in the occasional knock-down drag-out.  

"I do not know.  I was not a uniquely violent man before I enlisted, but I had socially acceptable outlets for any violent urges.  I used to box, Marquis of Queensbury rules, and I learned a little fencing at Eton.  The desperation of war can drive a man to do things he had never thought of before, and I certainly was not brutal before. Am not brutal now, when I am not engaged in my duty.  There is nothing that says a man cannot be brutal when the situation calls for it and then return to a peaceful life without suffering unduly."

"So it is context then, and context entirely? You do not believe the war has changed your core personality?"

"No I do not.  It merely-- brought out another side, that may not have seen daylight otherwise."

This answer provided the answer that Mary craved.

Simcoe sipped his tea, and Mary sipped hers.  They ruminated in silence.

Mary thought about how she would have lived out her days in blissful ignorance of her unladylike talent for violence and decisive action without Abe's fit of treason.  She thought of how he needed her, how he looked at her with gratitude as she pulled him out of the fire.  She thought of how her actions had ensured her son kept his father, and decided that her unladylike actions were nevertheless the right ones.  War pushed women too, and if Abe or anyone else or the little voice in her head that sounded vaguely like her mother thought she was an unfit woman because of how the war had pushed her then they could go hang.

Simcoe's thoughts were taken up with a similar topic.  He had never thought of himself as a violent man, but he supposed, now that he thought about it, that he must have been, at least a little.  He could not imagine a world where he could not fight ever.  In any context.  He looked over at Mary, with her fine-boned wrists and delicate curls, her feminine light blue gown and its motion constricting frills.  He remembered the simmering fire that he had detected in her blue eyes.  And he thought, for the first time in his life, that women had no place to vent any rage that they might feel.  Thought for the first time how a high class woman like Mary Woodhull might feel rage at all.  That a man taking a mistress was akin to a woman cuckolding her husband, and might induce similar anger but with no outlet.  He thought about how men of his acquaint mocked women's anger, as shrill or unbecoming, and called them shrews or fishwives.

He, of course, never imagined that Mary's conversation was spurred by her own violent actions, instead of un-acted upon rage that he, on further reflection, imagined reasonable given her husband's various inadequacies.  He also never imagined that she had a strategic mind that would be the envy of many an officer and, as he sat there sipping tea in her father in law's parlor, that she had turned that mind to the troublesome problem of himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Republican Motherhood was seen as the ideal form of femininity immediately following the Revolutionary War, wherein it was the woman's responsibility to be the moral center of the home. She was to raise her boys to be good citizens, her girls to value family and embody virtue, and council her husband on moral issues. Mary struggles with this ideal in the face of her talent for coldly orchestrating violence.


End file.
